Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Daring Fireball: Resigned
Resigned
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Reading around the web an hour ago, looking for confirmation of the then-minutes-old news that Steve Jobs had resigned as CEO, I repeatedly encountered and bridled each time at use of the adjective “shocking” to describe the announcement. But my initial resentment was unwarranted. This is not out of nowhere, it’s not even unexpected. We could all see this was coming — but it is a shock.
I saw that headline and my nervous system took a jolt.
The thing to keep in mind is this: Apple tomorrow, a week from now, and next month is the exact same Apple from yesterday, a week ago, and last month. Tim Cook wasn’t named “CEO” until today, but he’s been the chief executive at the company since Jobs started this — his third — medical leave back in January, and probably even before that. Whatever Steve’s role is going forward, it’s only different in title than what it has been, in effect, for some time. Whatever it is that ails him, he’s been diminished.
It’s no coincidence that I wrote about succeeding Jobs just last month. All you need to read in that piece is the second footnote:
Perhaps this entire article could be replaced with, “Look, it’s going to be Tim Cook, and that’s that.”
How do you replace the irreplaceable man? Like we’re seeing. An open-ended medical leave, where he retains the CEO title. A continuation of strong new products, including a major improvement to the iPad, the device that is upending the entire computer industry. The ceding of day-to-day operations and leadership to Tim Cook, his right-hand man and chosen successor. Ever-higher profiles during public product announcements of top product-focused lieutenants like Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, and Eddy Cue. It wasn’t something you could see or hear, but from the audience during this year’s WWDC keynote, it was something you could feel. Midway through, I wrote:
He’s here, but this is the first post-Steve keynote.
Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
Today’s announcement is just one more step, albeit a big and sad one, in a long-planned orderly transition — a transition that no one wanted but which could not, alas, be avoided. And as ever, he’s doing it his way.
So it goes.
Steve Jobs: The End Of An Era | TechCrunch
We all know the broad strokes: a boy is born to a graduate student and her Syrian boyfriend. She places the boy for adoption. He comes to live with Paul and Clara. Paul is a machinist who moved to San Francisco after WWII. He grows up in Santa Clara county. It’s flat, lots of one story buildings, mostly middle/upper middle class, outside of the bad parts. Parts of it are pretty, parts aren’t. He wasn’t coddled. His biological mother makes his adoptive parents promise to send him to college. In fourth grade he has a great teacher and, presumably, another and another.
His parents scrape to send him to Reed. He drops out of college and starts dropping in on classes that interest him. He makes money returning bottles and he hits the Hare Krishna temple now and then for a free meal. He takes calligraphy, eschews the typical coursework, and at age 20 he and a buddy start a company.
He’s a buddhist with a temper. He cuts down rivals and builds up a team of 4,000 dedicated to his singular vision. He’s ousted, builds another company or two, and comes back. He’s kind of a hippie, enjoying Bob Dylan and the Beatles. He loves music.
He’s leaving, now, the victim of something gnawing at his health like sea spray whittles a wooden pier.
Where does that leave Apple? And where does that leave us?
I wasn’t always a Mac lover. I thought they were over-priced and pretty, the candy colors far too silly for my 486 tastes. Any chip that had the word Power in its name was overcompensating, I wagered.
But over the past decade I learned the satisfaction of a machine that just works. It’s a machine that the boy put most of his life into, a machine that has the heart of a much older thing, a thing that lay blinking and frantic in a Stanford computer lab somewhere and then, over time, shrank down to something you and I can fit into our pockets.
Many complained that the ecosystem that he created was a walled garden, but I’d equate it to a pasture. “The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance,” wrote Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “But its background is always in perfect harmony.” In the front, anything can happen. In the back, perfect calm and order.
There is a strain of Internet thought that requires us to tear down, to refuse to see the other side. There will be plenty of that going on in the next few days as talking heads talk. But name one CEO who, on leaving his company, will raise such a wave of well-wishes and interest? When Michael Dell dodders off or Howard Stringer plops into a club chair for his final cigar, will anyone care the next day?
We all know the broad strokes: The man got sicker, he almost quit, kept at it. He embraced a successor and groomed him to be as calm a force as he once was. He kept us surprised, entertained, constantly speculating. We wondered where he was. If he was well.
We all know the broad strokes: He isn’t well. He’s stepped down. Another Buddhist (or near enough to one) said “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
Godspeed, Mr. Jobs. We’ll miss you on stage.
